This is part one of a very detailed follow up story in Slate about the suicide of Phoebe Prince. Very sad, and so much more to the story...

Quote:

If you've read about the death of Phoebe Prince and its aftermath in People magazine or the Boston Globe or Boston Herald or the Irish Independent, or watched TV segments about the case, the image of Sean reading an anti-bullying message might seem like further evidence that bad kids were running the show at South Hadley High. But what if that's wrong? What if Sean was in fact a strong kid who had looked out for weaker ones? What if there was no pack of untouchable mean girls ruling the halls of South Hadley High, as the Boston Globe column that kicked off national coverage of the case suggested?

I've been reporting in South Hadley since February, as part of a series on cyberbullying. There is no question that some of the teenagers facing criminal charges treated Phoebe cruelly. But not all of them did. And it's hard to see how any of the kids going to trial this fall ever could have anticipated the consequences of their actions, for Phoebe or for themselves. Should we send teenagers to prison for being nasty to one another? Is it really fair to lay the burden of Phoebe's suicide on these kids?

District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel believes it is. The most serious charge against five of the teenagers—Sean, Ashley Longe, Kayla Narey, Sharon Chanon Velazquez, and Flannery Mullins—is civil rights violation with bodily injury. Defense lawyers expect Scheibel to argue that Phoebe's civil rights were violated because she was called an "Irish slut"—a denigration of her national origin—and because the bullying interfered with her right to an education.